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An Old Flame Flames Out

When Leslie Camhi reconnected with her first love, everything fell into place. Then he vanished.

Did you ever wonder what would happen if your first love returned to you, the one you’d never really gotten over? What if that person came back and declared that you were the one he never should have lost, and now that he’d found you, he wouldn’t let you go again?

Well, that happened to me. He was my first love; he was a poet when we were growing up, alienated teenagers in neighboring suburban towns, and when he found me again he had become an author and journalist. A few years older than I, he had helped shape my interests and my sensibility the way only someone you meet when you are very young can shape you. He had introduced me, back then, to French poetry, reading aloud the letters, filled with optimism and longing, that the surrealist Robert Desnos (who would die in deportation) had written to his beloved, Youki, from the wartime camp where he was imprisoned. Now he took me to A-list parties and the kind of restaurant that is hard to get into without a connection or a special phone number.

He was infinitely precious to me, someone who was present at the emergence of my adult identity, who had shared my adolescent yearnings for a life in art, who understood, without my having to explain a word, the troubled childhood I’d fled without looking back. I had traveled a long road to become the woman he encountered again in the twenty-first century. I had survived an elaborate literary education. I had lived abroad and loved in many languages. Returning to this country, I had given birth to myself as a writer, and late in life I had given birth to a little boy, my life’s treasure, who was then five years old. Who but my first love could take the full measure of these transformations?

Not my son’s father, an uncompromising artist with whom I shared a twelve-year history, a loft in SoHo, and the care of our child, but hardly anything else at this point. Not my brother and sister, who for years had kept both my bohemianism and my accomplishments at arm’s length. My parents were long dead. When my first love returned, he brought tenderness, physical passion, intellectual companionship, and unqualified support for my work, combined with an adoring rapport with my son. It felt like salvation.

If I think about it honestly, there was an element of venality in his appeal for me. I loved him for the past we shared, littered with ghosts both literary and familial, and for the future he promised me, filled with the accoutrements of a successful life in the media: luxurious gifts, fabulous vacations. (Really, though, leisure-starved as I was, just about any vacation would do for me.)

And yet this person, whom I embraced with the full force of my longing for family, this person whom I trusted instantly because he understood me and because I knew him, wove an elaborate web of semitruths and obfuscations surrounding the basic facts of his life. And then he disappeared.

The love was real. How much of the rest was illusion? I still don’t know.

Our adult love story began with a phone call he made out of the blue one spring afternoon. I hadn’t heard from him for an eternity, but the voice on the line was unmistakable. Years earlier, a memoir he’d written had reached me at a work address; I’d stayed up all night reading it and loved it, though I was mildly disappointed to find in it no mention of myself. The memoir had ended with his marrying and moving to a small town where his wife’s career had led them. Now he was in New York. We made a date for Saturday afternoon, to have coffee and catch up.

Saturday came, and in the midst of a miserable row with my son’s father, the telephone rang. It was him. I hadn’t confirmed our meeting, and so, he told me, he was flying on assignment to London that afternoon. “You haven’t changed,” I said, a bit ruefully, recalling the will-o’-the-wisp behavior that decades ago had driven me to distraction. He paused. “Yes, but at least now it’s without consequences,” he replied. We laughed and agreed to meet in ten days, when he returned.

But it was weeks later when he rang again, and this time he was in front of my building. I abandoned the article I was writing and quickly checked my reflection in the mirror; at the last minute Asher, my son, jumped into the elevator with me to go and meet him. He was standing on the other side of a glass door leading out onto the street. As skinny and energetic as a teenager, he was preternaturally unchanged but for the straw fedora that hid his increasing baldness; when he saw us, he pressed himself violently to the glass and clawed at it. Asher threw back his head and laughed wildly.

My son, wise beyond his years, has always seemed to harbor the spirit of a man in a child’s body. Here was the perfect playmate for him: a man who refused to grow up. Between them it was love at first sight.

He came upstairs with us, lingering just long enough to meet my son’s father and to play with Asher, and then he and I went around the corner to Balthazar for a chat. It was 4:00 p.m., but he insisted on ordering lunch. So we shared a plate of oysters, and he finished both his own and my glass of wine, as I was too nervous to drink.

He listened carefully to my highly edited description of my life. He said he’d seen me pictured with Asher in a photo in a magazine, that he’d admired my writing for years, and that he’d love to collaborate with me. A screenplay he’d written had interested a producer, but it needed a rewrite—he had no doubt of my abilities and thought I would enjoy the work, for which I would be “handsomely” paid. As for himself, besides his journalism, occasional screenwriting, and the memoir I’d read, he had published both fiction and nonfiction.

He told me he had been separated from his wife for five years. They had no children. After they split, he purchased a home not too far from where she still lived—a house in a forest with a screened-in porch, where a small herd of cattle grazed on his land and a family of ducks came waddling to his front door. That had become his base while he traveled incessantly for work. Now he was moving to New York.

My cell phone rang. “My agent,” I joked, knowing full well that it would be my son’s father, as my free time (that scarcest of commodities) had undoubtedly run out.

We parted. The next day an enormous box of presents arrived for Asher, silly things, but thoughtfully chosen to delight a little boy—an electronic yodeling pickle, a Curious George alarm clock, a miniature pirate that expanded miraculously in water. In the days that followed, there were books for me, along with the promised screenplay and a flood of endlessly flattering e-mails. He signed them “Overwhelmingly yours.”

Was that a common affectation? I didn’t know. I chose to believe it was a singular sentiment, addressed to me alone.

He was traveling, and our first evening together, ostensibly to talk about the rewrite of his screenplay, occurred several weeks later. He was wearing a blue polka-dot tie and a cardigan sweater, like a child’s drawing of adult attire. The restaurant where he had reserved a table for us was packed with famous names; paparazzi were permanently camped outside. It was a strange setting for an encounter of such emotional intensity.

As a child, I was told that there was one person in the world who was destined for me. And I remember wondering how we would find each other if we spoke no common language. Today I am fluent in French and can get by in German, Spanish, and Italian. Perhaps, by learning languages, I had hoped to increase the likelihood of meeting my life’s partner. But the one my heart chose spoke my language so completely and knew the workings of my mind so intimately that he could finish my sentences with ease. He had walked the street where I grew up.

We spoke of many things that evening—of the work of writing, of the loneliness that lurks in coupledom, of the finite number of chances life offers for happiness. And, strange as it may seem, we also spoke of a future together. The leap from present circumstances to that vision seemed unimaginable, but we had no doubt that it would be made. As we left the restaurant, one of the paparazzi snapped our picture. If I could study that photograph now, what would it reveal to me? Would it show two people in love? Or would it show a woman accompanied by a phantom, stepping off into an abyss?

It was a shock to discover, lurking within me, the memory of his flesh. The first kiss we shared as he walked me home through the deserted streets brought back to me, in a way I never could have anticipated, the feeling of his lips some 30 years earlier. “It’s such a great story,” I said, as if offering my professional opinion on our love as material. “I would rather live it than write it,” he replied, leaning in to embrace me. Behind his poor posture and neurasthenic demeanor was the body of a man, fully formed.

By July he had rented a small apartment within walking distance of my home. Its tiny bedroom, hung with yellow curtains, looked out onto a nineteenth-century churchyard whose ancient trees sheltered crumbling gravestones—very Wuthering Heights. The months passed quickly in a blur of assignments and assignations, of work, correspondence, and passionate encounters unfolding in the brief hours between our many obligations. The screenwriting we’d planned was put off. There were lost years to make up for; and there was wild gratitude for this opportunity to begin anew. I even welcomed his frequent absences since they afforded a temporary respite from the almost unbearable strain I faced at home of shielding my son, who risked being caught in the crossfire of his father’s wrath at me. I am a poor liar, and my excuses, though strenuously proffered, were not believed.

When I expressed my doubts about my new-old love’s relinquishing his nomadic existence, he insisted that it no longer suited him, that he longed to be married to me and to share my life with Asher. My son had never known, except in rare intervals, a peaceful family life. Our few outings together with the person he called his “best friend” (limited, because they risked further inflaming the situation at home) were simple but magical. On a walk through Central Park, we played at being squirrels, sharing a meal of acorns together under the trees. Strangers commented on the beauty of our “family.”

Sometime in December, he told me his divorce had been finalized, and I made plans to move out with Asher. I rented an apartment for us way uptown near my son’s school: a rambling duplex with a long terrace and a maple tree hanging over it. On our first evening there in May, the three of us sat in its shade and shared a pizza for dinner; the feeling of freedom, the release afforded by this new beginning, was a source of immense happiness.

We agreed that we would marry and he would move in with us in a year’s time, when everyone (including, we hoped, my son’s father) had adjusted to the changed circumstances. Then, once he had sold his house, we would look for a home to buy together. He had given me a ring, and though it was not an engagement ring (that, he said, he hoped I would pick out at a fabled shop for old-school Hollywood royalty), I wore it constantly. We entertained ideas about who would officiate at our wedding and where we might hold the reception. In the meantime, he was spending long weeks at that house in the forest, working on his new book, a nonfiction account of a legendary love affair. He was astonishingly productive when there, perhaps, I reasoned, because it was so difficult to reach him. There was no land line (forest animals were continually gnawing through the wires, he said) and limited cell-phone reception. But if I texted him he would almost always manage to call me back while roaming the grounds.

Later I came to doubt whether this house ever existed; or if it existed, whether or not it had ever belonged to him. He spoke many times about what fun it would be to visit there with Asher, how together they would drive a tractor around the pasture. But something always turned up (a freak storm, a sudden deadline) to make the promised visit impossible.At the time I was patient. I focused on repairing my son’s relationship with his father, and adapting to life as a single mother. And I worked on a book proposal that my fiancé had encouraged me to write. The book (my first), on a French subject, called for considerable research in Paris, which worried me. But he insisted that he would find a way to join us there.

At a family wedding he escorted me to in August, we laughed and danced. And as he chatted with my outrageously un-p.c. cousin and my elderly aunts, I felt an unaccustomed lightness, a belief in love’s redemption.

I finished my book proposal at summer’s end. As the fall wore on, his behavior became increasingly erratic. I was used to his arriving days late from out-of-town trips; however, soon he began not showing up for promised dates with Asher. I protected the child by never mentioning his visits ahead of time. That way, if he didn’t turn up, no one suffered but me.“Children need to learn to deal with disappointment” was his response when I questioned his behavior.

Children, apparently, were not the only ones. I had rented a spacious apartment based in part upon his promises to share it with us. He wrote me large checks and then instructed me not to deposit them.

My book sold in early November, but he was still struggling with his manuscript and time was getting tight. Christmas Eve, which, being Jewish, I don’t usually celebrate, would be the only holiday we shared that year, when he very sweetly took me out for a festive dinner at Mr. Chow. A few days later he flew to the Midwestern city where his elderly mother and divorced sister lived. His mother (whom I remembered fondly) had come down with pneumonia. He called me before midnight from just outside the hospital room where she was recovering.

I spent New Year’s Eve at a friend’s dinner party. I felt secure in his love, though he was far from me.

By mid-February the news from his family had become alarming. His sister’s health had suddenly deteriorated. She was suffering from renal failure, he said, while anxiety over her condition had put his mother, with her fragile heart, back in the hospital. He would need to fly there to help coordinate their care.

He came to see us on the day before leaving. It was February 13. He’d had a haircut and didn’t seem like someone setting out in desperate circumstances. On the phone the next morning I stifled my uneasiness and wished him a happy Valentine’s Day.

He wrote me highly detailed and loving text messages from the Midwest about rattling around alone in his mother’s huge apartment. About a relative who did research at a top medical facility and who was consulting on his sister’s case. And about how the tensions between his mother and his sister’s ex-husband were complicating matters for everyone. He wrote that he didn’t deserve my love but that he would die trying.

I won’t go into the circumstances that made me, on a hunch, phone his favorite hotel in Los Angeles. A receptionist told me that he had checked in on the day he left New York. The woman he called his ex-wife had also checked into the hotel, in a separate room.

I was having trouble breathing, let alone understanding this turn of events. But my reflexes as a researcher were suddenly reawakened. I checked his publisher’s Web page. The book he had told me he was writing alone was announced there for later that year, coauthored by my fiancé and his wife.

I Googled the mailing address he’d once given me for the house in the forest. It came up as an art gallery belonging to friends he’d mentioned but whom I’d never met. There was no record that I could find of his divorce, or of his owning property anywhere in the state, except for the house he had shared with his wife in the small town where she worked.These days, people meet strangers online and then check them out in real life. I knew this person from real life. I not only shared his origins and his past; I had seen, spoken, or otherwise communicated with him daily for almost two years. Now, in the space of a few hours, the stories he had told me about himself were unraveling. I had thought that my own life would at last make sense. But this was madness.

He continued to send me remarkably loving text messages filled with updates on his mother’s and sister’s progress. I wrote and told him not to worry, that I predicted a full recovery for them both.

Then I took to my bed. From under the sheets, I called a close friend. And after three days, unable to stand it any longer, I decided to call him. It was 2:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, but I counted on his being awake. He picked up. “Hello, darling,” I said sweetly, infusing the phrase with all the compassion I could muster for our wounded love. He heard my voice and hung up.

Is lying the worst thing you can do to a person? I benefited from this man’s belief in me, from his generosity, and from the seemingly endless wellspring of his creative talent. He delighted my son, offering him a partner in childish crimes and an outlet for wild imaginings. His fantasies changed our reality. Yet his inability or unwillingness to distinguish truth from make-believe left my child and me very vulnerable.

The weeks following our aborted phone conversation were punishing. He wrote to me constantly. He was getting on a plane to be with me; he was checking into a hotel at LAX; his luggage was en route to New York without him. What was true? All I knew was that he refused to speak with me.

He claimed to be under emotional stress and trying to work through it. He would be arriving in New York soon. He hoped I would see him. He begged to be allowed to celebrate my upcoming birthday with me. Instead, a friend threw me a small party. It was lovely, but the atmosphere was heavy, as at a wake. My son’s birthday followed mine the next day. An enormous bunch of space-themed silver balloons arrived for him from the man whom I could no longer consider my fiancé, like the balloons that had once floated over Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Love doesn’t always die when trust suffers a mortal blow; but daily life becomes all but impossible. Over the next few months, as he returned to New York and I began making frequent trips to Paris, the dribs and drabs of half-truths were wrestled out of him. No, his divorce had not been finalized, though he said a legal separation had laid the groundwork for it. He had written the book alone, but there were problems with it and he had asked his wife, also a writer, to help fix it. They had traveled to L.A. for research.

“If you choose to rehabilitate him, I would do it very slowly,” a friend counseled wisely. I exhausted myself questioning everything he said. Yet we both clung to the leaky life raft of my belief in him.

Throughout the fall, when I was based in Paris, he never visited us as promised but continued to write and phone almost daily. In December we returned to New York for Asher’s school holiday. My son stayed with his father, while I stayed with my boyfriend (for that’s what he now was) in the tiny apartment with the yellow curtains. But I felt he was hiding from me.Asher and I returned to face the relentless gray of a Paris winter, during which my boyfriend phoned less regularly. Still, in March, when I was debating whether or not to come back to New York for my son’s spring break, he offered to buy our tickets and to put me up in the downtown hotel where our love affair had first been rekindled. “As long as I can visit you there,” he said, “everything will be all right.”

Then he disappeared. Phone calls, text messages, and e-mails were not returned.

“Capable of loving but not of living” was my friend Sheila’s diagnosis. From a small town in Nebraska, she’s an artist who has lived in Paris since the 1960s. Her third husband, whom she knew in graduate school but waited 30 years to marry, lives in New York. They see each other “when they want to,” she told me, which is very frequently. “I don’t need to be with him all the time to know that we are together,” she said.

Wherever my first love is now, I believe it is a lonely place.

He once described the movie industry as a young person’s game—because you needed the stamina to juggle nine different projects simultaneously, in the hopes that one would pan out. Did he approach his private life in a similar manner? Were we one of many story lines for him? Perhaps we were the “sentimental story,” or the “passionate story,” or the “family man” story. For a time, we were certainly the most important of his narratives. Then our importance receded.Asher, now eight, was scrolling through some pictures on my BlackBerry the other day. Suddenly he started crying—little animal-like sounds from deep within him. He had come across a shot of himself, sharing a hot chocolate in New York the previous December with the man that both he and I had loved. It was like seeing a photograph of a person who had died. “I miss him,” my son said simply.

People say that children are resilient, but they also underestimate the depth of a child’s feelings. My son has parents who love him; he is eminently lovable, and he will be loved again. With his elephantine memory, however, he will not soon forget this phantom.

As for myself, I am drawing from the obvious lessons of self-reliance contained in this story. I am also cultivating my appreciation of temporary pleasures: a beautiful apartment we may live in for perhaps a year longer; a good meal; a fine love affair; sand castles at the beach. Nothing lasts forever, except perhaps the bonds that we form in childhood, whose haunting power we recover at our own risk.